The Pygmalion in Us - Managing Self-Expectations

Photo Credit: Reji

"Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right." ~ Henry Ford

Let me admit. I have been meaning to write on the subject for over two months now. And each time I would put pen to paper; I would say to myself, "wait a minute, I do not feel enough about the subject yet to come across as self-assured." It was as if something needed to happen to sweep me away in a whirlwind of undeniable conviction before I could say what I wanted to say since a long time. I wanted to speak as a practitioner rather than as an academic.

J. Sterling Livingston's article Pygmalion in Management, originally published in Harvard Business Review in 1969 had struck me as undeniable truth, not for all the evidence provided but simply for the empirical nature of the assertion. It made perfect sense and helped me explain the mechanics of how expectations influence human behavior - a phenomenon I had observed intriguingly as a student.

In Ovid's narrative poem Metamorphoses, Pygmalion was a Cypriot sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved. Pygmalion made offerings at the altar of Aphrodite and quietly wished for a bride who would be "the living likeness of my ivory girl". Later he found that Aphrodite had granted his wish and he married the ivory sculpture changed to a woman under Aphrodite's blessing.

Despite years of credible scientific research on the subject, the spectacle continues to fascinate psychologists and experts in organizational behavior and colossal amounts of effort to unravel the mystery persist to this day. To me however, my experience of the past few weeks went one better than the years of scientific research at giving me the self-assurance I was searching for. This time around, an opposite experience proved the point.

Lucky enough for me, I was conscientiously aware of the phenomenon before it actually struck me. A senior leader, known for his caustic retorts and self-righteous conduct, much like for his flamboyant competence that intimidated coworkers rather than draw admiration or respect, had been picking on some team members for no obvious reason. He had been voicing concerns based on his feeling that a certain project would not be successful owing to the demanding nature of the undertaking and that members of the team (yours truly included) are unlikely to be successful at delivering the goods. That feeling was so conspicuous and the message trickled down to the working team so frequently through multiple channels - both formal and informal - that we actually started to believe that achieving success is a tall order. As some time went by, we got more and more convinced that our talents and abilities fall short of what is required to achieve the task at hand. After all, the feeling was being fed into our psyche by someone in a position of authority.

And then, one Saturday morning while I sat at a café, sipping my coffee and looking out the window at the birds picking straws from a sparse haystack, my attention was suddenly drawn to a mother telling her daughter that she was too young to do a certain chore. I turned my head to look at the four-year old's face as the glow of childish eagerness disappeared into a deluge of disappointment. I realized from her expression that she had clearly accepted her defeat even before taking a stab at the challenge. Notwithstanding my disappointment, it was an "aha" moment for me. Pygmalion was the first word that came to mind.

In terms of organizational behavior, as much as high expectations of a leader serve to engender desired behavior among followers, low expectations pull them down into a spiral of self-defeating reactions that have an adverse bearing on their behavior and consequently, their performance. This is dubbed the Golem effect to distinguish it from Pygmalion effect. The spiral would look something like this:

Leader's expectations > self-perception > self-expectation > low/high performance > failure/success > leader's perception > leader's expectations...

In the start of the spiral, others' expectations of us would shape our self-perception; the more positive the expectations, the more positive our self-perception and hence self-expectation.

Now remove the leader from this whole equation. Focus on yourself and your self-expectations. Just like the expectations others have of us play a role in shaping our self-perception and potential to achieve success, our own expectations of ourselves determine our potential and future success (or failure) to a large degree. It is a self-fulfilling prophesy of its own kind. Having started with negative expectation of ourselves, our ensuing failure further serves to cement out future expectations; again leading to a spiral of negative results and hence more negative expectations. While a person's self-expectation is shaped by many other intrinsic and extrinsic factors and is seldom the first cause in this chain of cause and effect, changing the negative self-expectation is often times the first step to break the vicious cycle illustrated below:

Negative self-expectation > negative self-perception > low performance > failure > leader's negative perception > leader's negative expectations > negative self-expectations...

The CEO of one of the top global investment firms was asked the question, "what do you attribute your success to?" He responded by saying, "the more difficult people thought something is; the more determined I was to try my luck at it. So I treaded the paths where there was no competition. After some time, I was the only expert at things nobody ever had the nerve to do for the first time. And what gave me the courage to try out difficult things was my positive expectation of myself."

The younger we are, the more vulnerable we find ourselves to other people's negative expectations. This programs us to doubt ourselves. Later, we become our own enemies and don't depend on others for a generous supply of discouragement. In case of the little girl, the only way her confidence could have been shattered was by a negative expectation of an authority-figure. Otherwise she virtually had no limits to her self-expectations.

In other words, by the time we are grown-up, our expectations of ourselves have already been shaped by other's expectations of us, much like a harness that would limit the growth of body parts. If in an ideal scenario, a child grows up insulated from the negative expectations of others around her, her self-expectations would remain positive, only adjusted from time to time by her own negative experiences. Therefore, the only negative effect to her self-perception would be by the reality of her experiences rather than by the perception of others.

The question then is - how to keep others' negative expectations from marring our self-perception and to keep the Pygmalion in us alive. Considering that mind is a receptacle of whatever is inculcated in it through the outer stimuli, creating a mental filter to others' negative expectations warrants building a higher state of consciousness that is more connected with the inner self than with the outer stimuli. The filter works to keep the negativity of the outer stimuli from staining the positivity of the inner self only when the consciousness remains submerged in the inner self. In simpler terms, it takes mental exercise to learn to shun the outer voices and concentrate on the voices of the uncorrupted inner self.

Conversely though, you would not like to ignore others' positive expectations that might shape your own positive self-perception. The key is then to selectively learn to ignore only the negative expectations and take the positive outer voices as a means to reinforce the inner positivity - positive self-perception and self-expectation.
Whether it is in an organizational setting or otherwise, being your own leader gives you the leeway to shape your expectations to suite you. That aligns outer expectations to inner expectations since both become one and the same. The equation changes to:

Positive self-expectation > positive self-perception > high performance > success > leader's positive perception > leader's positive expectations > positive self-expectations...

Switching from the formal spiral to the latter requires breaking away from the course to create a positive consciousness of the self. This can only emanate from within. If this is not done, a person would remain dependent on others' expectations for the controllable outcomes in his life; expectations that might not be positive at all times.

Considering the strength of the Pygmalion in us all, shifting the paradigm of expectation-performance relationship in young generation can possibly raise the human potential to an unprecedented level. While this sounds daunting and demands a massive revamping of our educational, social, economic, familial, and political systems, we can always lead by example in our individual capacity by tapping into our inner conscience to create positive expectations of ourselves and our children.